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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Rumor: China really hates Bitcoin

The rollercoaster ride that is the Bitcoin market took a deep dive yesterday following yet another bombshell out of China – this time round, the People’s Bank of China has been rumored to consider banned third-party payment companies from doing business with Bitcoin exchanges.

Bitcoin prices fell by around 30% on hearing the news, which was first reported by Coindesk.com and later confirmed in a tweet by Bill Bishop, the editor of the Sinocism newsletter and a New York Times contributor. There is still some speculation regarding the authenticity of these reports, but if they do turn out to be true, things could be very bleak for Chinese investors in BTC. The reports certainly have the community worried – at the time of writing, Bitcoin’s value had sunk to $707.9 as a weighted average across multiple exchanges, according to Bitcoinaverage.com.

The PBoC’s decision apparently came during a meeting between its officials and those from about a dozen third-party payment companies, which include the popular Alipay service. During the meeting, the companies were reportedly told they could no longer offer services to buy or sell BTC on exchanges, says Coindesk. The ban also covers other cryptocurrencies, including Litecoin.

The Chinese language news site Yicai further elaborated on the report, stating that users can still withdraw money from BTC exchanges via third-party payment processors until Jan 31, but they can no longer deposit funds. It’s too early to tell what kind of effect this will have on the Chinese Bitcoin community, but the biggest fear is it could lead to a run on exchanges that would severely disrupt what is already an extremely volatile market. Certainly, it’s not going to make things any easier – exchanges are by far and away the most common platform for trading in Bitcoins, and without them the only options are buying direct from miners, peer-to-peer trading and other inconvenient methods.

For now, Yicai notes that Chinese buyers still have one avenue for buying and selling on Bitcoin exchanges – their normal Chinese bank accounts – but warns that these could be banned too, as most of them are state-controlled.

We should note that not everyone is convinced of the accuracy of these reports. Coindesk doesn’t name any sources in its report, whilst SiliconANGLE’s founding editor and Bitcoin expert Mark Hopkins cautioned his followers on Facebook that “these rumors out of China almost always turn out to be misinterpreted.”

We’ll post an update if and when the news is clarified.

On the same day as the PBoC’s ruling, Coindesk reports that China’s largest exchange, BTC China, has re-implemented 0.3 percent fees for each transaction – a move that it said is designed to prevent impulsive trading and stabilize the market. Previously, BTC China was offering a zero percent commission promotion.

About Mike Wheatley

Mike Wheatley is a senior staff writer at SiliconANGLE. He loves to write about Big Data and the Internet of Things, and explore how these technologies are evolving and helping businesses to become more agile.
Before joining SiliconANGLE, Mike was an editor at Argophilia Travel News, an occassional contributer to The Epoch Times, and has also dabbled in SEO and social media marketing. He usually bases himself in Bangkok, Thailand, though he can often be found roaming through the jungles or chilling on a beach.
Got a news story or tip? Email Mike@SiliconANGLE.com.